On Saturday, I was guest panellist at the St James' Institute's gathering entitled Is Scripture Enough?
My co-panellists were Rev Dr Dorothy Lee and Rev Prof Andrew McGowan, both from Melbourne's Trinity College. Being theologians, we all answered the set question by stroking our chins and saying "it depends what you mean."
In his address, Andrew in fact focused more the clarity rather than the sufficiency of Scripture. I think we found a sort of consensus in the fact that Article VI is pretty much normative for Anglicans - the sufficiency of scripture is to do with salvation. The regulative principle view is in fact that which Anglicans rejected. However, we are not to view a Classic Anglican like Richard Hooker as placing reason or tradition above or even alongside scripture - for him scripture is authoritive, though reason and tradition are instrumental in its reading (though this has been the reading of Hooker since the 19th century, it is actually inaccurate, as Andrew acknowledged. He never mentioned the three-legged stool!).
Rather the issue is clarity. Both Andrew and Dorothy were at pains to state that they did not hold to a kind of postmodern interpretative free-for-all. Nevertheless, Scripture contains some difficult places and some complexity and richness (which of course is what 2 Peter says about Paul!). These have to be acknowledged and addressed. For Andrew, 'the gospel itself is clear' in Scripture (he sounds a lot like Peter Jensen's The Doctrine of Revelation at this point!). This does not mean that an absolute textual clarity follows. In fact, Scripture itself describes itself as having an obfuscating role for some - it is even a judgement on them that this is the case.
So - the question is, for me: what is the corollory for the actual textual clarity of the words of Scripture of the Reformation teaching of the spiritual or evangelical clarity of scripture (as expressed in the Westminster Confession no less!)? And further: what hermeneutic can help us not give too much weight to the claims and counter-claims of historians, without becoming obscurantist?
These a major questions of course, and will lead to major differences. However, if the normative and authoritative role of scripture for the church can be agreed I think the ground has shifted in an interesting direction. Twenty or thirty years ago I think you might have heard a more magisterial view, or a more decisive authoritive role given to tradition, or experience, or perhaps a more optimistic view of human reason. The work - and let's not be under any illusions, this is a big task - remains to be done on the text of scripture itself. What is it actually saying? How are we to receive it?
Showing posts with label scripture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scripture. Show all posts
Monday, July 06, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Two must-reads
You just have to read Oliver O'Donovan's lecture on the Authority of Scripture, which riffs on The Jerusalem Declaration - including this:
'We shall be obedient to Scripture to the extent that we have learned and acted upon what Scripture has said of them. But Scripture does not provide us with the concrete act itself, which we must perform right now. Devising that act is precisely what practical thought does, and devising it faithfully to the norm is what obedience is all about....Obedience is never predetermined, it has always be thought through and sought after.'
I was also taken by this 'Theological Vision for Ministry' published by the Gospel Coalition. Their confessional statement is rather dull: but this 'vision' actually takes it all somewhere, addressing (among other things) epistemological and hermeneutical issues with an honesty and self-awareness rarely seen. It is still a creature of the American context, however...
Oh, and I killed a baby, by the way...
'We shall be obedient to Scripture to the extent that we have learned and acted upon what Scripture has said of them. But Scripture does not provide us with the concrete act itself, which we must perform right now. Devising that act is precisely what practical thought does, and devising it faithfully to the norm is what obedience is all about....Obedience is never predetermined, it has always be thought through and sought after.'
I was also taken by this 'Theological Vision for Ministry' published by the Gospel Coalition. Their confessional statement is rather dull: but this 'vision' actually takes it all somewhere, addressing (among other things) epistemological and hermeneutical issues with an honesty and self-awareness rarely seen. It is still a creature of the American context, however...
Oh, and I killed a baby, by the way...
Friday, August 15, 2008
What need is there of theology?
…there is [among Biblical scholars] an unwillingness to accept the existence and the significance of theology as a discipline in its own right. One of several roots of this unwillingness is, perversely, the popular Protestant insistence on sola scriptura. When one has the Bible, what need is there for the subtleties and sophistries of theology?
Francis Watson, Text and Truth, p.4
Well, quite. I don't think it is a good understanding of sola scriptura that leads to this difficulty though...
Francis Watson, Text and Truth, p.4
Well, quite. I don't think it is a good understanding of sola scriptura that leads to this difficulty though...
Saturday, February 02, 2008
de Lubac on Christianity and history
Not bad stuff this, from Henri de Lubac, everybody's favourite mid-century French Catholic theologian:
The Bible makes an extraordinary impression on the historian: the conbtrast between the humble beginnings of Israel and the potency of the seed, or rather the explosives, which it contains; its concrete shape shrouded from the outset in the loftiest beliefs; then its stately expansion its confident though hidden progress to a boundless and unpredictable end: nowhere else can be found anything in the least like it. Nothing resembles the stupendous incoherence of its prophetic literature; only a transfiguration of the whole, glimpsed in sudden flashes, can prevent overwhelming and endless contradictions. The historical character of the religion of Israel can be understood in all its originality only through its consummation in the religion of Christ. We should never forget that the explanation of Judaims is not to be found within itself. Catholicism, p. 164
I think he is right about the OT... its coherence (without Christ) is rather slippery. Deuteronomy is a wonderful case in point: a law book that points to its own redundancy and to the inevitability of its own insufficiency... amazing.
The Bible makes an extraordinary impression on the historian: the conbtrast between the humble beginnings of Israel and the potency of the seed, or rather the explosives, which it contains; its concrete shape shrouded from the outset in the loftiest beliefs; then its stately expansion its confident though hidden progress to a boundless and unpredictable end: nowhere else can be found anything in the least like it. Nothing resembles the stupendous incoherence of its prophetic literature; only a transfiguration of the whole, glimpsed in sudden flashes, can prevent overwhelming and endless contradictions. The historical character of the religion of Israel can be understood in all its originality only through its consummation in the religion of Christ. We should never forget that the explanation of Judaims is not to be found within itself. Catholicism, p. 164
I think he is right about the OT... its coherence (without Christ) is rather slippery. Deuteronomy is a wonderful case in point: a law book that points to its own redundancy and to the inevitability of its own insufficiency... amazing.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
More on Williams and Wiles...
Has Williams succeeded in outflanking Wiles? Has he, in other words, managed to burrow into the world of the text such that krisis – that moment of decision when we are confronted, yea even judged by what we meet in the text – is allowed its prominence? Williams attempts to see from within: but has he smuggled in an objectivism – the kind of objectivism he repudiates – somewhere along the line? Tendenzkritik, that form of criticism most interested in uncovering in the text the interests of various individuals and communities, per definition tends to be hypersuspicious of ‘interests’. It holds as its moral starting point the critique of power itself. Is it not the case, however, that Williams’ version of krisis – his teaching on the judgement of Christ – resembles the values of Tendenzkritik?
That is to say: Williams seems to operate with a definite set of moral presuppositions. For example, he is tentative in his claims about language because of the tendency of individuals and groups to use language – and perhaps religious language more than any other kind – for their own interests. This is what the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth exposes to us, on his account. Williams would argue that Kritik is the right kind of intellectual work prompted by and encounter with Jesus: it takes his judgement and applies it self-critically to the practice of Christian speaking and thinking about God. Yet is it not surely the case that this reading of Jesus, and this application of Jesus’ teaching, is itself generated by the application of critical methods to the New Testament? It goes without saying that the history of New Testament scholarship is dominated by the triumphant revelation by each generation of the prejudices and preferences of the previous one.[1]
My charge is that Williams’ exposition of krisis is a product itself of Kritik, rather than the other way around. The problem is, once Tendenzkritik is in the tank, it tends to devour all the other fish. Where does Kritik end and krisis begin? Can we so readily shift from one to the other? Is this a moral possibility to have a text which is so beset with interest-laden and inadequate human talk as authoritative Scripture, as the catholic church has always held it to be? It is difficult to see how, on Williams account, we can read the New Testament with any confidence that we are able to apply the right filtration to the text and so be judged by it in exactly the right way. Can we really be both radically suspicious and humbly naïve about the text at one and the same time?
[1] See Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
That is to say: Williams seems to operate with a definite set of moral presuppositions. For example, he is tentative in his claims about language because of the tendency of individuals and groups to use language – and perhaps religious language more than any other kind – for their own interests. This is what the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth exposes to us, on his account. Williams would argue that Kritik is the right kind of intellectual work prompted by and encounter with Jesus: it takes his judgement and applies it self-critically to the practice of Christian speaking and thinking about God. Yet is it not surely the case that this reading of Jesus, and this application of Jesus’ teaching, is itself generated by the application of critical methods to the New Testament? It goes without saying that the history of New Testament scholarship is dominated by the triumphant revelation by each generation of the prejudices and preferences of the previous one.[1]
My charge is that Williams’ exposition of krisis is a product itself of Kritik, rather than the other way around. The problem is, once Tendenzkritik is in the tank, it tends to devour all the other fish. Where does Kritik end and krisis begin? Can we so readily shift from one to the other? Is this a moral possibility to have a text which is so beset with interest-laden and inadequate human talk as authoritative Scripture, as the catholic church has always held it to be? It is difficult to see how, on Williams account, we can read the New Testament with any confidence that we are able to apply the right filtration to the text and so be judged by it in exactly the right way. Can we really be both radically suspicious and humbly naïve about the text at one and the same time?
[1] See Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Monday, December 24, 2007
Webster and Inspiration - Verbal Inspiration
I found Webster's book Holy Scripture - A Dogmatic Sketch a very stimulating little book. He mounts a defence - or a restatement - even of the much maligned doctrine of verbal inspiration (chapter 1. p. 30ff.):
'Here we reach the particala veri (ie, limited truth) of the notion of verbal inspiration. Because verbal inspiration was routinely misconstrued (sometimes by its defenders and nearly always by its detractors) as entailing divine dictation, the notion of inspriation has been 'personalised' or 'de-verbalised' and redefined as authorial illumination. This distancing of inspiration from the verbal character of the text is considered to ease the difficulties of offering an account of inspiration by thinking of the words of the text as a purely human arena of activity, whether of authors, redactors or tradents. But the result is again docetic. The implied distinction between (inspired) content and creaturely form is awkward, and very easily makes authorial (or perhaps community) consciousness or experience the real substance of the text, of which the words are the external expressions. This is uncomfortably close to those styles of eucharistic theology in which the sacrament is considered to be a transaction between the gospel and the religious consciousness, to which visible forms are accidently attached. No less than consecration, inspiration concerns the relation of God's communication and specific creaturely forms;
inspiration, that is, involves words...' (p. 37-8)
(Is he thinking of Calvin's view of the Supper here? hmm...) He continues:
'Properly understood, 'verbal' inspiration does not extract words from their field of production or reception, does not make the text a less than historical entity, or make the text itself a divine agent. Nor does it entail neglect of the revelatory presence of God in favour of an account of originary inspiration. It simply indicates the inclusion of texts in the sanctifying work of the Spirit so that they may become fitting vessels of the treasure of the gospel.'
(p. 38)
This 'may become' is not just a case of the Scripture becoming the word of God as it is read by the church: he is definitely ascribing to the process of the text coming into being an inspiration by the Holy Spirit.
'Here we reach the particala veri (ie, limited truth) of the notion of verbal inspiration. Because verbal inspiration was routinely misconstrued (sometimes by its defenders and nearly always by its detractors) as entailing divine dictation, the notion of inspriation has been 'personalised' or 'de-verbalised' and redefined as authorial illumination. This distancing of inspiration from the verbal character of the text is considered to ease the difficulties of offering an account of inspiration by thinking of the words of the text as a purely human arena of activity, whether of authors, redactors or tradents. But the result is again docetic. The implied distinction between (inspired) content and creaturely form is awkward, and very easily makes authorial (or perhaps community) consciousness or experience the real substance of the text, of which the words are the external expressions. This is uncomfortably close to those styles of eucharistic theology in which the sacrament is considered to be a transaction between the gospel and the religious consciousness, to which visible forms are accidently attached. No less than consecration, inspiration concerns the relation of God's communication and specific creaturely forms;
inspiration, that is, involves words...' (p. 37-8)
(Is he thinking of Calvin's view of the Supper here? hmm...) He continues:
'Properly understood, 'verbal' inspiration does not extract words from their field of production or reception, does not make the text a less than historical entity, or make the text itself a divine agent. Nor does it entail neglect of the revelatory presence of God in favour of an account of originary inspiration. It simply indicates the inclusion of texts in the sanctifying work of the Spirit so that they may become fitting vessels of the treasure of the gospel.'
(p. 38)
This 'may become' is not just a case of the Scripture becoming the word of God as it is read by the church: he is definitely ascribing to the process of the text coming into being an inspiration by the Holy Spirit.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
A word on scripture in theology
A word as to hermeneutical method deployed is needed at this point [ie in my thesis!]. The early martyr-acts and the patristic discussions of martyrdom are richly drenched in scriptural references and allusions. This was possible and meaningful because (despite the variety of methods of interpretation used) the scriptures were held to be a unity cohering in Christ, the one whose death provided the template for Christian martyrdom. The texts of scripture had particular import for these individuals facing a terrible death, and as it is reported, gave them particular inspiration and solace.[1] Scripture ought to have particular prominence and authority in any theological account of martyrdom, therefore. More than this: a reading of the canonical scriptures which highlights their salvation-historical – and so Christological – shape is the appropriate complement to the subject at hand, because theological reflection on martyrdom has always had this perspective in one way or another. We attempt to read scripture, therefore, with an eye to its unfolding disclosure of a history of redemption as well as to the theological concepts that it generates.[2] The readings of scripture we attempt here are necessarily selective, but in each case the selections of texts are neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. The salvation-historical nature of the material necessarily plunges us into the business of narrative analysis; but it also the case that the scriptures provide the frame, or chart the trajectory for a theological discussion they themselves prompt but do not provide.
[1] Brad S. Gregory says the same about the martyrs of the Reformation era. Gregory, Salvation at Stake : Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, p. ??
[2] We hope to take heed of Oliver O’Donovan’s stern warning not to ‘dip into Israel’s experience at one point … and to take out a single disconnected image or theme from it’ which would be ‘to treat the history of God’s reign like a commonplace book or a dictionary of quotations.’ Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27.
[1] Brad S. Gregory says the same about the martyrs of the Reformation era. Gregory, Salvation at Stake : Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, p. ??
[2] We hope to take heed of Oliver O’Donovan’s stern warning not to ‘dip into Israel’s experience at one point … and to take out a single disconnected image or theme from it’ which would be ‘to treat the history of God’s reign like a commonplace book or a dictionary of quotations.’ Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The power of Scripture VII
Conclusion
The postmodern offence with Scripture is rooted in the problem of power and the way it appears to violate human autonomy.[1] What I have tried to establish in response is that, although the creator has indeed an authority that is of a different order from that any creature can rightly command, the word of God in the pages of Scripture functions as powerful in ways that do not contravene its humanity. In fact, that God speaks using human writing is entirely in keeping with the God whose essential nature it is to seek relationship with his creatures. His authority is, as Colin Gunton phrases it, ‘an authority of grace’.[2] We need not deny the power of the words of Scripture. But we can observe how God deals graciously and gently with us in it. The gospel proclaimed in its pages is divinely powerful – powerful for the salvation of those who believe. It is a powerful expression of the love of God.
[1] The language is Colin Gunton’s. C.E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 31
The postmodern offence with Scripture is rooted in the problem of power and the way it appears to violate human autonomy.[1] What I have tried to establish in response is that, although the creator has indeed an authority that is of a different order from that any creature can rightly command, the word of God in the pages of Scripture functions as powerful in ways that do not contravene its humanity. In fact, that God speaks using human writing is entirely in keeping with the God whose essential nature it is to seek relationship with his creatures. His authority is, as Colin Gunton phrases it, ‘an authority of grace’.[2] We need not deny the power of the words of Scripture. But we can observe how God deals graciously and gently with us in it. The gospel proclaimed in its pages is divinely powerful – powerful for the salvation of those who believe. It is a powerful expression of the love of God.
[1] The language is Colin Gunton’s. C.E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 31
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The power of Scripture VI
Second, the power of Scripture is legitimate because of the freedom that its readers are given to accept or reject it. It isn’t an incantation, as wizard-words are; or some kind of hallucinogenic rhetoric that robs its readers of their capacity to respond as persons. The freedom of readers is always to close the book – to remain deaf to the voice of God. Resistance, as Foucault observed, is always possible, to the point of self-destruction. God’s authority is, we may say, exercised gently, or even graciously. As Richard Bauckham puts it:
This is how the Bible transcends the contemporary dilemma of a total incompatibility between freedom and authority, conceived as total autonomy versus oppressive authoritarianism. The authority that inheres in the biblical story is the authority of grace. In other words, the biblical metanarrative is a story not of the assertion of autonomy in domination, but of grace and free response. In this story all is given by God, including freedom.[1]
The covenant-making God calls his people to respond to his redeeming of them with their continued trust and obedience. The book of Deuteronomy may serve as an example. Yhwh founds his command to his people on his mighty and gracious liberation of them from Egypt. Memory of the gracious acts of Yhwh is the sine qua non of Israel’s life and the ground of her obedience to him. While refusal of the command of Yhwh is condemned, it still remains for them a possible choice (see Dt 30-1). Although the word of God - the commands, stipulations, decrees and ordinances – is a word of authority among the people, it is up to them to enact that word.[2] It is they who are to ‘fear the Lord you God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God’ (Dt 10:12-13). The will of Yhwh is to be carried out by the co-joining of his will to the wills of the people. They are to submit, but it is from freedom that they submit, else it is not true obedience.
It is at this stage that I would like to note the place that Scriptures themselves give to the voice of protest against the absence of God. The gentleness of the voice of God in Scripture is such that he even allows the articulation of a dissent against him. The complaint of the Psalmist at the delay of Yhwh’s justice is one of the remarkable features of this word that God can call his own word. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ pleads the Psalmist. That the God-forsaken man utters the same words on the cross reveals how well this complaint has been heard by the one to whom it was made: so well heard indeed that he enters into the very condition that led to that complaint.
Third, the final power to which Scripture gives witness remains to be seen. That is, the Scriptures declare and describe the coming judgement of God according to the righteousness of his character. The day is coming when the Lord will powerfully fulfill all the words of Scripture and show them decisively to have been true words.
According to its human nature, Scripture is revealed to be powerful along the continuum of salvation-history. That power has yet to be revealed in full; it as yet remains a power that is partly concealed, and in contention. It is rejected as much as accepted; denied as much as affirmed. It is a great, unfinished symphony! The themes have been stated and re-stated, but the resolving cadence has yet to be played.
However, we must also assert that the judgement of God has been inserted into human history, at the cross of Christ. For all the gentleness and forbearance of God’s word to us in Scripture, it has at its central motif God’s fearful verdict on humanity. The publication of this judgement in the pages of Scripture stands as a terrible warning to men and women of what the final judgement holds for them. It is God’s promise that he will vindicate his own righteousness at the last.
Furthermore, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – the most dramatic revelation of God’s power since creation (see Rom 4:17) – we receive public notification that, in the work of Jesus, God himself was at work. He was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). How much more can the believer expect salvation from the wrath to come! As Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15, we are shown in the risen Christ the trajectory of what is to come. The death and resurrection of Christ ‘according to the Scriptures’ are a powerful affirmation of those Scriptures from within the present age ahead of the final Yes of God, which is yet to come.
Recognition of the place in salvation history from which we receive and read the Scriptures means that we can strongly affirm the meaningfulness and trustworthiness of those writings without claiming that we have complete mastery over that meaning here and now. We also know that we read those Scriptures with the responsibility to answer to their divine author for how we read and respond. As we read the Scriptures, we read as seriously as we can to discern the meaning of those writings, neither shirking the discomfort of disagreement nor avoiding the painful truth in them. Reading with what we might call an ‘eschatological’ sense we may avoid merely co-opting Scripture in the service of our own power and instead become its servants: not using the text, but being used by it.
[1] Richard Bauckham, "Authority and Scripture," in God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville, Ky.; London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 67-8
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer similarly speaks about the practice of the Word of God. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)
This is how the Bible transcends the contemporary dilemma of a total incompatibility between freedom and authority, conceived as total autonomy versus oppressive authoritarianism. The authority that inheres in the biblical story is the authority of grace. In other words, the biblical metanarrative is a story not of the assertion of autonomy in domination, but of grace and free response. In this story all is given by God, including freedom.[1]
The covenant-making God calls his people to respond to his redeeming of them with their continued trust and obedience. The book of Deuteronomy may serve as an example. Yhwh founds his command to his people on his mighty and gracious liberation of them from Egypt. Memory of the gracious acts of Yhwh is the sine qua non of Israel’s life and the ground of her obedience to him. While refusal of the command of Yhwh is condemned, it still remains for them a possible choice (see Dt 30-1). Although the word of God - the commands, stipulations, decrees and ordinances – is a word of authority among the people, it is up to them to enact that word.[2] It is they who are to ‘fear the Lord you God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God’ (Dt 10:12-13). The will of Yhwh is to be carried out by the co-joining of his will to the wills of the people. They are to submit, but it is from freedom that they submit, else it is not true obedience.
It is at this stage that I would like to note the place that Scriptures themselves give to the voice of protest against the absence of God. The gentleness of the voice of God in Scripture is such that he even allows the articulation of a dissent against him. The complaint of the Psalmist at the delay of Yhwh’s justice is one of the remarkable features of this word that God can call his own word. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ pleads the Psalmist. That the God-forsaken man utters the same words on the cross reveals how well this complaint has been heard by the one to whom it was made: so well heard indeed that he enters into the very condition that led to that complaint.
Third, the final power to which Scripture gives witness remains to be seen. That is, the Scriptures declare and describe the coming judgement of God according to the righteousness of his character. The day is coming when the Lord will powerfully fulfill all the words of Scripture and show them decisively to have been true words.
According to its human nature, Scripture is revealed to be powerful along the continuum of salvation-history. That power has yet to be revealed in full; it as yet remains a power that is partly concealed, and in contention. It is rejected as much as accepted; denied as much as affirmed. It is a great, unfinished symphony! The themes have been stated and re-stated, but the resolving cadence has yet to be played.
However, we must also assert that the judgement of God has been inserted into human history, at the cross of Christ. For all the gentleness and forbearance of God’s word to us in Scripture, it has at its central motif God’s fearful verdict on humanity. The publication of this judgement in the pages of Scripture stands as a terrible warning to men and women of what the final judgement holds for them. It is God’s promise that he will vindicate his own righteousness at the last.
Furthermore, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – the most dramatic revelation of God’s power since creation (see Rom 4:17) – we receive public notification that, in the work of Jesus, God himself was at work. He was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). How much more can the believer expect salvation from the wrath to come! As Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15, we are shown in the risen Christ the trajectory of what is to come. The death and resurrection of Christ ‘according to the Scriptures’ are a powerful affirmation of those Scriptures from within the present age ahead of the final Yes of God, which is yet to come.
Recognition of the place in salvation history from which we receive and read the Scriptures means that we can strongly affirm the meaningfulness and trustworthiness of those writings without claiming that we have complete mastery over that meaning here and now. We also know that we read those Scriptures with the responsibility to answer to their divine author for how we read and respond. As we read the Scriptures, we read as seriously as we can to discern the meaning of those writings, neither shirking the discomfort of disagreement nor avoiding the painful truth in them. Reading with what we might call an ‘eschatological’ sense we may avoid merely co-opting Scripture in the service of our own power and instead become its servants: not using the text, but being used by it.
[1] Richard Bauckham, "Authority and Scripture," in God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville, Ky.; London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 67-8
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer similarly speaks about the practice of the Word of God. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The power of Scripture V
Some utterly pagan dancing.
Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.
The drawing out of God’s speaking over time as portrayed in the Scriptures is a feature of his stooping to us – what we may call his gentleness. This gentle accommodation is not an act or a façade: rather, it is entirely true to the character of the God the Bible describes, a characteristic seen in its full flourishing in the obedience and humility of the Son.
Promise is one feature of God’s stooping to us in Scripture; the use of a human mediator is another. That divine speaking might be mediated through human words is not an embarrassment to Scripture itself. At Horeb Israel shrank back for fear of God’s word to them: ‘if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer, we shall die. For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the fire as we have and remained alive?’ (Dt 5:25-6) Yhwh provided for them a mediator, Moses, to teach and expound his will to them. The role of the prophet in the Old Testament grows out of this gracious possibility in the life of Israel with Yhwh. In appreciation of this point lies an important rejoinder to Shaw, Jasper and Castelli: the power that Paul claims is only as a messenger of the gracious divine word – the gospel in other words – and expressed with persistent awareness of the limitations of his own humanity and the derivative nature of his authority. In fact, in the Corinthian correspondence, he appeals to his own weakness, suffering and lack of verbal skill as a sign of the work of the Father of the crucified and risen Christ in him.
ii. the gentleness of God
The written words of the Bible show the perspiration of human authors as much as the inspiration of a divine one. Can the divine authority survive uncompromised by its use of human language? Can the Bible as God’s word overcome the scandal (to use Barth’s phrase) of its humanity? For an answer to this question I point to the nature of the Scriptures themselves, and make three points:
First, the Scriptures are promissory and prophetic in nature. They have at their core the great promises of God to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai and, later, to David: and signal God’s declaration of his commitment to his people. In Jesus of Nazareth all God’s promises coalesce; and yet in him there is a magnification, an intensification, as well as a fulfillment, of the ancient promises. The promise of his return and the recapitulation of all things in him is the abiding hope of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, whose work as inspirer, illuminator and counsellor so closely intertwines with the words of Scripture, is given to believers as an arrabon or guarantee of the return of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor 1:22).
The legitimate power of Scripture is rooted in the God who says and it is, as we have seen. But it is a power now played out gradually, over the sweep of human history, within and across human culture and language. The word of the creator God HAS the power of absolute force, but the Bible’s power is not like this. It is a power appropriate to human nature, too. With that in mind, we may observe that scripture is primarily and not incidentally a narrative. The various parts of the Bible cohere around the story that is its central theme. This narrative shape is not merely the casing for a set of propositions or timeless truths. It is quite deliberately immanent, as humans are. The Scriptures chart a revelation that has taken time to come to its fullness. For men and women to see the righteousness and trustworthiness of God necessitates the passage of time: for it is only over time that promises are to be declared, believed, tested and fulfilled.
We might here adopt Calvin’s language of accommodation to describe what we here find in the nature of the Scriptures. In speaking to us in Scripture, ‘God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us’ as a nurse does with a baby:
The written words of the Bible show the perspiration of human authors as much as the inspiration of a divine one. Can the divine authority survive uncompromised by its use of human language? Can the Bible as God’s word overcome the scandal (to use Barth’s phrase) of its humanity? For an answer to this question I point to the nature of the Scriptures themselves, and make three points:
First, the Scriptures are promissory and prophetic in nature. They have at their core the great promises of God to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai and, later, to David: and signal God’s declaration of his commitment to his people. In Jesus of Nazareth all God’s promises coalesce; and yet in him there is a magnification, an intensification, as well as a fulfillment, of the ancient promises. The promise of his return and the recapitulation of all things in him is the abiding hope of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, whose work as inspirer, illuminator and counsellor so closely intertwines with the words of Scripture, is given to believers as an arrabon or guarantee of the return of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor 1:22).
The legitimate power of Scripture is rooted in the God who says and it is, as we have seen. But it is a power now played out gradually, over the sweep of human history, within and across human culture and language. The word of the creator God HAS the power of absolute force, but the Bible’s power is not like this. It is a power appropriate to human nature, too. With that in mind, we may observe that scripture is primarily and not incidentally a narrative. The various parts of the Bible cohere around the story that is its central theme. This narrative shape is not merely the casing for a set of propositions or timeless truths. It is quite deliberately immanent, as humans are. The Scriptures chart a revelation that has taken time to come to its fullness. For men and women to see the righteousness and trustworthiness of God necessitates the passage of time: for it is only over time that promises are to be declared, believed, tested and fulfilled.
We might here adopt Calvin’s language of accommodation to describe what we here find in the nature of the Scriptures. In speaking to us in Scripture, ‘God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us’ as a nurse does with a baby:
Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.
The drawing out of God’s speaking over time as portrayed in the Scriptures is a feature of his stooping to us – what we may call his gentleness. This gentle accommodation is not an act or a façade: rather, it is entirely true to the character of the God the Bible describes, a characteristic seen in its full flourishing in the obedience and humility of the Son.
Promise is one feature of God’s stooping to us in Scripture; the use of a human mediator is another. That divine speaking might be mediated through human words is not an embarrassment to Scripture itself. At Horeb Israel shrank back for fear of God’s word to them: ‘if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer, we shall die. For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the fire as we have and remained alive?’ (Dt 5:25-6) Yhwh provided for them a mediator, Moses, to teach and expound his will to them. The role of the prophet in the Old Testament grows out of this gracious possibility in the life of Israel with Yhwh. In appreciation of this point lies an important rejoinder to Shaw, Jasper and Castelli: the power that Paul claims is only as a messenger of the gracious divine word – the gospel in other words – and expressed with persistent awareness of the limitations of his own humanity and the derivative nature of his authority. In fact, in the Corinthian correspondence, he appeals to his own weakness, suffering and lack of verbal skill as a sign of the work of the Father of the crucified and risen Christ in him.
[more points to follow]
The power of Scripture IV
III God, Christ and Power
i. the authority of God
I would not want to dispute - but rather join with - the postmodern protest against abuses of power in the form of wizard-words. Across the sweep of history, human words have been deployed by the mighty to oppress the lowly. As George Orwell showed in 1984, language can be the ultimate instrument of coercion, offering the possibility of enslaving not just the body but the memory and the imagination as well – all without guns. If no power is available that is not guilty of this oppressive tendency, then a retreat into a peaceful plurality is the only strategy for the survival of the human race in the age of mass destruction. It is notoriously the case that the Bible has been co-opted by those who would support violence, terror and oppression: the apartheid regime in South Africa being only one such recent example. This is a text that has been misused: that much we can grant.
But the power critics have gone too far.[1] What they have failed to see is the crucified form in which the Bible seeks to persuade its readers; which is to say, although the Bible witnesses to an Almighty God, it witnesses to him through the story of his sacrificial love for the world. The God of the gospel is a God who himself rules by dint of an act of submission to the powers of the earth. The very nature of the Bible’s message in fact relativizes human attempts at domination: it is a power protest of its own.
The authority of the God of the Bible – the God who is Father, Son and Spirit – rests on three supports: his capacity to act, his knowledge, and his utter trustworthiness. First, Scripture testifies from its opening sentences to a Lord who says and it is. His Word corresponds exactly to reality: in fact, it is what reality is: ‘And it was so’. The absolute sovereignty of this deity is not met by any challenge. He is not tapping into some primal force or casting a spell, but exercising his free creative power and his absolute mastery of things. These words were the kind of speaking that wizards attempt to emulate: except that here, of course, the being that is speaking is of an entirely different order. And his act of creative will establishes his worthiness to receive the adulation of all creatures (Rev 4:11).
Second, God speaks true words because of his knowledge of all things. He has the ‘view from nowhere’, although it is better rebadged as the ‘view from heaven’; and so may properly speak powerful words. It is not that he is objective; rather he is authoritatively subjective. This difference in knowledge is what Yhwh wields against Job in Job 38-41: it is a comparison of Job’s ignorance (rather than his weakness) against Yhwh’s knowledge of the origin of things (rather than his strength). It is a conversation, not an arm-wrestle.
Third, the character of the God of Scripture is not dissembling or unreliable but utterly trustworthy. Words that he speaks do not distort or pervert reality. In speaking, this God speaks truly of the world but also speaks truly of himself. He does not construct an identity for himself like a participant in an Internet chat room. When he speaks, he truly reveals himself.
So: if the God who is mighty, knowledgeable and reliable speaks, ought we not expect powerfully authoritative words? Does he not have a moral right as well as the freedom and the capacity to utter words of power? Once again, Job 38-41 is suggestive: after all, what right do human beings have to dispute with God? And yet, from the whirlwind the Lord deigns to converse playfully and beautifully with Job in such a way that it restores him to his original dignity.
The lines of our argument are of course consummated in Christ himself, who as Prophet, Priest and King exercised the authority of God on earth. It is of course from this enfleshed Word that we learn not about what God is capable of doing but what he wills to do and does do. First, the life of Jesus was marked of course by dynamic activity – a virgin birth, and many miracles and healings. Yet, though his ministry had the character of a challenge he refrained from taking up arms against the rulers of the world. His consummate ‘act’ was becoming subject to the power of those who killed him. Secondly, he spoke, powerful, life-giving words – ‘Talitha koumi’; ‘Lazurus, come out!’; ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and yet also spent his days in patiently teaching his disciples from the Scriptures about the cross-shaped pattern of their discipleship. Thirdly, he also demonstrated in his life and death the utter covenant faithfulness of God; he was the proof that God had remembered his people, and that their consolation was near – as the aged Simeon and Anna recognized when they met the child Jesus at the Temple. In this cruciform way Christ was indeed ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24).
[1] It ought to be noted that some of Foucault’s interpreters have gone taken his descriptions of power and presented them as a blanket censure of all power. Elizabeth Castelli, for example, badly confuses the Foucauldian terms ‘governmentality’ and ‘domination’: Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power
i. the authority of God
I would not want to dispute - but rather join with - the postmodern protest against abuses of power in the form of wizard-words. Across the sweep of history, human words have been deployed by the mighty to oppress the lowly. As George Orwell showed in 1984, language can be the ultimate instrument of coercion, offering the possibility of enslaving not just the body but the memory and the imagination as well – all without guns. If no power is available that is not guilty of this oppressive tendency, then a retreat into a peaceful plurality is the only strategy for the survival of the human race in the age of mass destruction. It is notoriously the case that the Bible has been co-opted by those who would support violence, terror and oppression: the apartheid regime in South Africa being only one such recent example. This is a text that has been misused: that much we can grant.
But the power critics have gone too far.[1] What they have failed to see is the crucified form in which the Bible seeks to persuade its readers; which is to say, although the Bible witnesses to an Almighty God, it witnesses to him through the story of his sacrificial love for the world. The God of the gospel is a God who himself rules by dint of an act of submission to the powers of the earth. The very nature of the Bible’s message in fact relativizes human attempts at domination: it is a power protest of its own.
The authority of the God of the Bible – the God who is Father, Son and Spirit – rests on three supports: his capacity to act, his knowledge, and his utter trustworthiness. First, Scripture testifies from its opening sentences to a Lord who says and it is. His Word corresponds exactly to reality: in fact, it is what reality is: ‘And it was so’. The absolute sovereignty of this deity is not met by any challenge. He is not tapping into some primal force or casting a spell, but exercising his free creative power and his absolute mastery of things. These words were the kind of speaking that wizards attempt to emulate: except that here, of course, the being that is speaking is of an entirely different order. And his act of creative will establishes his worthiness to receive the adulation of all creatures (Rev 4:11).
Second, God speaks true words because of his knowledge of all things. He has the ‘view from nowhere’, although it is better rebadged as the ‘view from heaven’; and so may properly speak powerful words. It is not that he is objective; rather he is authoritatively subjective. This difference in knowledge is what Yhwh wields against Job in Job 38-41: it is a comparison of Job’s ignorance (rather than his weakness) against Yhwh’s knowledge of the origin of things (rather than his strength). It is a conversation, not an arm-wrestle.
Third, the character of the God of Scripture is not dissembling or unreliable but utterly trustworthy. Words that he speaks do not distort or pervert reality. In speaking, this God speaks truly of the world but also speaks truly of himself. He does not construct an identity for himself like a participant in an Internet chat room. When he speaks, he truly reveals himself.
So: if the God who is mighty, knowledgeable and reliable speaks, ought we not expect powerfully authoritative words? Does he not have a moral right as well as the freedom and the capacity to utter words of power? Once again, Job 38-41 is suggestive: after all, what right do human beings have to dispute with God? And yet, from the whirlwind the Lord deigns to converse playfully and beautifully with Job in such a way that it restores him to his original dignity.
The lines of our argument are of course consummated in Christ himself, who as Prophet, Priest and King exercised the authority of God on earth. It is of course from this enfleshed Word that we learn not about what God is capable of doing but what he wills to do and does do. First, the life of Jesus was marked of course by dynamic activity – a virgin birth, and many miracles and healings. Yet, though his ministry had the character of a challenge he refrained from taking up arms against the rulers of the world. His consummate ‘act’ was becoming subject to the power of those who killed him. Secondly, he spoke, powerful, life-giving words – ‘Talitha koumi’; ‘Lazurus, come out!’; ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and yet also spent his days in patiently teaching his disciples from the Scriptures about the cross-shaped pattern of their discipleship. Thirdly, he also demonstrated in his life and death the utter covenant faithfulness of God; he was the proof that God had remembered his people, and that their consolation was near – as the aged Simeon and Anna recognized when they met the child Jesus at the Temple. In this cruciform way Christ was indeed ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24).
[1] It ought to be noted that some of Foucault’s interpreters have gone taken his descriptions of power and presented them as a blanket censure of all power. Elizabeth Castelli, for example, badly confuses the Foucauldian terms ‘governmentality’ and ‘domination’: Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power
Monday, September 24, 2007
The power of Scripture III
ii Suspicion of Scripture as a discourse of Power
To the Enlightenment critique of the text of the Bible is now added a postmodern protest against its operation as a discourse of power. This ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ suspects that naïve reading of the Bible allows a system of power to develop in human communities that is detrimental to the flowering of individual selves in their full self-determining authenticity. We offer some examples: Elizabeth Castelli is one biblical scholar who has taken Foucault’s power analysis and applied it to the New Testament, and especially to the writings of Paul. She writes in her book Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power that:
[T]he thesis of this study is that the notion of mimesis functions in Paul’s letters as a strategy of power. That is, it articulates and rationalizes as true and natural a particular set of power relations within the social formation of early Christian communities.[1]
Reading those Pauline texts which enjoin his readers to imitation – 1 Thess 1:6, 2:14; Phil 3:17; 1 Cor 4:16, 11:1 – Castelli seeks to demonstrate that in doing this Paul is not benignly calling the churches to emulate a laudable ethical model, but rather inscribing in the early communities a hierarchical ‘economy of sameness’, resulting in a (sinister) ‘erasure of difference’. Paul’s rhetoric is not a rational argument, but a subtle assertion of power that needs to be exposed and resisted. These are wizard-words. Castelli writes:
Discourse is never innocent, it discloses the incapacity of any rhetoric to convey the truth.[2]
This betrays her suspicion that Paul is up to no good:
Paul’s discourse of power may be read as a complex fiction whereby he asserts the conditions of proper power relations in the Christian community at Corinth as truth… His attempts to reduce what to him is the cacophonous discord of many voices result in his own bellowing tones filling the stage.[3]
That is to say, when it comes to this scriptural author at least, we see him forming in his language – by his powerful metaphors and by his rhetorical stratagems – the conditions under which power will operate within the Christian community. But he doesn’t do this innocently, for Castelli: he does it to suppress diversity and shore up his own authority.[4]
Castelli is not alone. In his study of religious rhetoric, David Jasper writes:
Paul…leaves little space for mutuality or a real relationship between himself and the Thessalonians apart from that of their utter dependence upon him.[5]
He goes on:
Paul’s doctrine, it seems, cannot be distinguished from the political and personal moves of his writing, or the uneasiness of his relation to his readers. The assertion of authority and the exercise of personal power are dominant themes of these letters.[6]
Jasper’s deconstruction is not limited to Paul: he makes a case, following Frank Kermode’s analysis in his book The Genesis of Secrecy,[7] that Mark’s gospel can also be read as a dissembling book of secrets and suspicions, teasing and entrancing its readers with the covert aim of rendering them docile. Once again, the Scriptures are not here critiqued for their flawed textuality as such (which is generally assumed but set aside as irrelevant), but for their deployment of power.[8]
OK: so what seems to be the trouble? To summarize, the power-critics see Scripture – the text of texts[9] – as an attempt at wielding what we have called wizard-power. This is held to be an inappropriate and illegitimate use of human language. To misquote Oscar Wilde, rhetorical language is rarely pure and never simple; and the Bible is a celebrated case of this in action. The claim for the Bible that it is divinely inspired - or for any sort of authority - surely withers if it is as morally suspect as its critics hold. The criticism has two related features: first, that the Bible and its authors offer a totalizing world-view, a ‘view from nowhere’ that squashes heteronomy and allows no space for human freedom. To the postmodern mind this universal perspective inevitably leads to violence: the clash of the civilizations is rooted in their refusal of plurality: and the great religions of the book are held to be the cause of this implacable belligerence. The second side of the coin is that the Bible is an abusive form of power-language, inscribing its stories and words into human consciousness and invalidly authorizing the hegemony of patriarchal religious individuals and structures. In particular, feminist critics (like Castelli and Trible) have fought to uncover the suppressed and hidden voices of women marginalized by the phallo-centric biblical text.
[1] E. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p.15
[2] Ibid.
[3] E. Castelli, "Interpretations of Power in 1 Corinthians," in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. J.Bernauer and J.Carrette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 34-5
[4] We may say further that for Castelli, Foucault’s works have become Holy Writ. She is, it turns out, gormlessly uncritical of him while being super-suspicious of Paul. Why doesn’t she do a Pauline reading of Foucault?
[5] D. Jasper, Rhetoric, Power and Community (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 42
[6] Ibid.
[7] F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
[8] Other power-critics exercising the hermeneutics of suspicion include G. Shaw, The Cost of Authority – Manipulation and Freedom in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1983); and, from a feminist perspective P. Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). See also Bible and Culture Collective., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995).
[9] Since the study of literary criticism is a direct descendent of biblical interpretation, protest against textual authority inevitably entails a protest against the Bible.
To the Enlightenment critique of the text of the Bible is now added a postmodern protest against its operation as a discourse of power. This ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ suspects that naïve reading of the Bible allows a system of power to develop in human communities that is detrimental to the flowering of individual selves in their full self-determining authenticity. We offer some examples: Elizabeth Castelli is one biblical scholar who has taken Foucault’s power analysis and applied it to the New Testament, and especially to the writings of Paul. She writes in her book Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power that:
[T]he thesis of this study is that the notion of mimesis functions in Paul’s letters as a strategy of power. That is, it articulates and rationalizes as true and natural a particular set of power relations within the social formation of early Christian communities.[1]
Reading those Pauline texts which enjoin his readers to imitation – 1 Thess 1:6, 2:14; Phil 3:17; 1 Cor 4:16, 11:1 – Castelli seeks to demonstrate that in doing this Paul is not benignly calling the churches to emulate a laudable ethical model, but rather inscribing in the early communities a hierarchical ‘economy of sameness’, resulting in a (sinister) ‘erasure of difference’. Paul’s rhetoric is not a rational argument, but a subtle assertion of power that needs to be exposed and resisted. These are wizard-words. Castelli writes:
Discourse is never innocent, it discloses the incapacity of any rhetoric to convey the truth.[2]
This betrays her suspicion that Paul is up to no good:
Paul’s discourse of power may be read as a complex fiction whereby he asserts the conditions of proper power relations in the Christian community at Corinth as truth… His attempts to reduce what to him is the cacophonous discord of many voices result in his own bellowing tones filling the stage.[3]
That is to say, when it comes to this scriptural author at least, we see him forming in his language – by his powerful metaphors and by his rhetorical stratagems – the conditions under which power will operate within the Christian community. But he doesn’t do this innocently, for Castelli: he does it to suppress diversity and shore up his own authority.[4]
Castelli is not alone. In his study of religious rhetoric, David Jasper writes:
Paul…leaves little space for mutuality or a real relationship between himself and the Thessalonians apart from that of their utter dependence upon him.[5]
He goes on:
Paul’s doctrine, it seems, cannot be distinguished from the political and personal moves of his writing, or the uneasiness of his relation to his readers. The assertion of authority and the exercise of personal power are dominant themes of these letters.[6]
Jasper’s deconstruction is not limited to Paul: he makes a case, following Frank Kermode’s analysis in his book The Genesis of Secrecy,[7] that Mark’s gospel can also be read as a dissembling book of secrets and suspicions, teasing and entrancing its readers with the covert aim of rendering them docile. Once again, the Scriptures are not here critiqued for their flawed textuality as such (which is generally assumed but set aside as irrelevant), but for their deployment of power.[8]
OK: so what seems to be the trouble? To summarize, the power-critics see Scripture – the text of texts[9] – as an attempt at wielding what we have called wizard-power. This is held to be an inappropriate and illegitimate use of human language. To misquote Oscar Wilde, rhetorical language is rarely pure and never simple; and the Bible is a celebrated case of this in action. The claim for the Bible that it is divinely inspired - or for any sort of authority - surely withers if it is as morally suspect as its critics hold. The criticism has two related features: first, that the Bible and its authors offer a totalizing world-view, a ‘view from nowhere’ that squashes heteronomy and allows no space for human freedom. To the postmodern mind this universal perspective inevitably leads to violence: the clash of the civilizations is rooted in their refusal of plurality: and the great religions of the book are held to be the cause of this implacable belligerence. The second side of the coin is that the Bible is an abusive form of power-language, inscribing its stories and words into human consciousness and invalidly authorizing the hegemony of patriarchal religious individuals and structures. In particular, feminist critics (like Castelli and Trible) have fought to uncover the suppressed and hidden voices of women marginalized by the phallo-centric biblical text.
[1] E. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p.15
[2] Ibid.
[3] E. Castelli, "Interpretations of Power in 1 Corinthians," in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. J.Bernauer and J.Carrette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 34-5
[4] We may say further that for Castelli, Foucault’s works have become Holy Writ. She is, it turns out, gormlessly uncritical of him while being super-suspicious of Paul. Why doesn’t she do a Pauline reading of Foucault?
[5] D. Jasper, Rhetoric, Power and Community (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 42
[6] Ibid.
[7] F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
[8] Other power-critics exercising the hermeneutics of suspicion include G. Shaw, The Cost of Authority – Manipulation and Freedom in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1983); and, from a feminist perspective P. Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). See also Bible and Culture Collective., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995).
[9] Since the study of literary criticism is a direct descendent of biblical interpretation, protest against textual authority inevitably entails a protest against the Bible.
Friday, September 21, 2007
The power of Scripture II
II Suspicious Minds
i. Suspicion of power
Suspicion of power itself is a given of our times. [1] ‘Power’, we imagine, has the tendency to transgress the boundary of the individual, impinging on his or her freedoms and rights. It is the means by which control of one by another is exerted. Of course, this may be by violent physical coercion or by the threat of force, what Michel Foucault called ‘domination’; but power may also be exerted by shaping the realities in which people live: by the bureaucratic apparatus of government, by the shape of the physical environment, or by the instruments of commerce. These words are held to be in their own way ‘wizard-words’: words that may claim for themselves a power inappropriate to their humanity, a power that compromises the freedom of individuals to self-determine.
Postmodernity, showing itself to be the bastard child of modernity, offers a critique of (and a protest against) power in all its forms. However, the power of language to mould thought and behaviour has been the particular concern of postmodern thinkers. In particular they have sought to free us from the oppressive power of rhetoric. They have sought to unmask the work of wizard-words as a conjuring trick. Like the tin-man, the lion, the scarecrow and Dorothy, we will find when we actually meet the wizard that he isn’t what he seems: the power of words is merely illusion, a conjuring trick brought off using smoke and mirrors.
The acknowledged patron saint of postmodern power-criticism is Michel Foucault (d.1984).[2] In the 1970s Foucault became fascinated with power: though his interest was, he insisted, limited to asking how power is exercised in various contexts. Rather than seeing power as a thing held by various groups or institutions, he preferred to see power as a ubiquitous network of social relations and interactions. ‘Power is everywhere’, he wrote, ‘not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere’.[3] Power circulates within a system of relationships rather being the possession of a particular person or group. As Foucault put it: ‘Power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social’.[4]
Crucially for our study of powerful words, power operates through discourse. Therefore, Foucault argues that the scientific knowledge so beloved of the Enlightenment does not free human subjects from the shackles of power relations but in fact enmeshes them in what he termed ‘power/knowledge’ (pavoir/savoir). There was not a liberation so much as an exchange of discourses. We can see this today in the discourse of scientific knowledge, with its appeal to ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ and the supremacy of a particular type of reasoning.
Foucault did not indicate that he felt all power was essentially bad. In fact, by describing the hidden fingers of power in human relationships he highlighted the increased possibilities within the mechanisms of (what he called) governmentality for genuine resistance to occur.[5] By describing the operations of power he hoped to enable people to be less docile in response to it – exposure of the hidden mechanisms of control is the route to freedom from them.
[1] It is noteworthy that ‘power’ in the discourse of the mass media almost always has a negative, even sinister, connotation: if an individual or an institution is ‘powerful’ it is almost never held to be a good thing.
[2] For an example of one author who takes the canonisation of Foucault very seriously indeed, see: David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) He writes at one point: ' as far as I am concerned, the guy is an f---ing saint.'
[3] M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality - an Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 92-3
[4] M. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Power, ed. J.D. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 345
[5] Foucault’s neologism ‘governmentality’ indicates ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculation and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of society’ in Ibid., p. 219-20
i. Suspicion of power
Suspicion of power itself is a given of our times. [1] ‘Power’, we imagine, has the tendency to transgress the boundary of the individual, impinging on his or her freedoms and rights. It is the means by which control of one by another is exerted. Of course, this may be by violent physical coercion or by the threat of force, what Michel Foucault called ‘domination’; but power may also be exerted by shaping the realities in which people live: by the bureaucratic apparatus of government, by the shape of the physical environment, or by the instruments of commerce. These words are held to be in their own way ‘wizard-words’: words that may claim for themselves a power inappropriate to their humanity, a power that compromises the freedom of individuals to self-determine.
Postmodernity, showing itself to be the bastard child of modernity, offers a critique of (and a protest against) power in all its forms. However, the power of language to mould thought and behaviour has been the particular concern of postmodern thinkers. In particular they have sought to free us from the oppressive power of rhetoric. They have sought to unmask the work of wizard-words as a conjuring trick. Like the tin-man, the lion, the scarecrow and Dorothy, we will find when we actually meet the wizard that he isn’t what he seems: the power of words is merely illusion, a conjuring trick brought off using smoke and mirrors.
The acknowledged patron saint of postmodern power-criticism is Michel Foucault (d.1984).[2] In the 1970s Foucault became fascinated with power: though his interest was, he insisted, limited to asking how power is exercised in various contexts. Rather than seeing power as a thing held by various groups or institutions, he preferred to see power as a ubiquitous network of social relations and interactions. ‘Power is everywhere’, he wrote, ‘not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere’.[3] Power circulates within a system of relationships rather being the possession of a particular person or group. As Foucault put it: ‘Power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social’.[4]
Crucially for our study of powerful words, power operates through discourse. Therefore, Foucault argues that the scientific knowledge so beloved of the Enlightenment does not free human subjects from the shackles of power relations but in fact enmeshes them in what he termed ‘power/knowledge’ (pavoir/savoir). There was not a liberation so much as an exchange of discourses. We can see this today in the discourse of scientific knowledge, with its appeal to ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ and the supremacy of a particular type of reasoning.
Foucault did not indicate that he felt all power was essentially bad. In fact, by describing the hidden fingers of power in human relationships he highlighted the increased possibilities within the mechanisms of (what he called) governmentality for genuine resistance to occur.[5] By describing the operations of power he hoped to enable people to be less docile in response to it – exposure of the hidden mechanisms of control is the route to freedom from them.
[1] It is noteworthy that ‘power’ in the discourse of the mass media almost always has a negative, even sinister, connotation: if an individual or an institution is ‘powerful’ it is almost never held to be a good thing.
[2] For an example of one author who takes the canonisation of Foucault very seriously indeed, see: David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) He writes at one point: ' as far as I am concerned, the guy is an f---ing saint.'
[3] M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality - an Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 92-3
[4] M. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Power, ed. J.D. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 345
[5] Foucault’s neologism ‘governmentality’ indicates ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculation and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of society’ in Ibid., p. 219-20
The power of Scripture
[Being, in successive parts, a version of a paper given to the Moore College School of Theology 2004]
The wizard & the prophet
‘Now, don’t forget that nice wrist movement we’ve been practicing!’ squeaked Professor Flitwick, perched on top of his pile of books as usual. ‘Swish and flick, remember, swish and flick. And saying the magic words properly is very important, too – never forget Wizard Baruffio, who said ‘s’ instead of ‘f’ and found himself on the floor with a buffalo on his chest.’
It was very difficult. Harry and Seamus swished and flicked, but the feather they were supposed to be sending skywards just lay on the desktop. Seamus got so impertinent that he prodded it with his wand and set fire to it – Harry had to put it out with his hat.
Ron, at the next table, wasn’t having much more luck.
‘Wingardium Leviosa!’ he shouted, waving his long arms like a windmill.
‘You’re saying it wrong,’ Harry heard Hermione snap. ‘It’s Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa, make the ‘gar’ nice and long.’
You do it, then, if you’re so clever,’ Ron snarled.
Hermione rolled up the sleeves of her gown, flicked her wand and said ‘Wingardium Leviosa!’
Their feather rose off the desk and hovered about four feet above their heads.[1]
I Wizard Words
It has since ancient times been a human dream that the mere utterance of words - at least some words – may accomplish powerful acts. The hunch that many ‘primitive’ cultures have had is that a word and its object are linked by a particular kind of energy, a magic, that is brought into being by the articulation of the very word.[2] It is the wizard or witch who masters the spell who controls the magic and so wields its power. Further, the ancients suspected that knowing the name of a god or spirit gave one power over it: and so the real name of Rome, for example, was concealed for fear of the curses of her enemies. Despite the sweetness of Hermione and Harry, this wielder of word-power is one to be feared, on account of the very real possibility of a non-negotiable whisper that may imprison or enchant another. This terror is deep in the consciousness of most human cultures.[3] So, it is at the same time a dream to be the speaker of such words and a nightmare to live in a world where others may speak them.
Since Nietzche – and especially among his postmodern children – the suspicion is that the Bible is an attempt to introduce ‘wizard words’ into human community: that it is the supreme exercise in exploitative manipulation by words. The Bible is suspected of pretending to a power of an illegitimate kind: of trading in a hypnotic rhetoric. Further, the Bible, because of its evident power in human culture, it is felt, is susceptible to being harnessed in the interests of human power. At heart, this is an ethical protest: it questions the moral right of the claim that the Scriptures address human lives with authority. What is needed is rather emancipation from the spell that such books have over human communities.
However, as I shall contend, the Bible evades this critique on account of the nature of its contents. Though it testifies to a God whose words called the universe into being, it also relates the history of that God’s costly gentleness with his people. The heartbeat of the Scriptures is the gospel of the sacrificial love of God for the world in Jesus Christ – it consists in a laying aside of power for the purpose of peaceful reconciliation rather than a naked assertion of it for the purpose of domination.[4] My first task will be to outline the power-critics case against the Bible; my response will be to inquire into the way in which the Bible seeks to persuade its readers of its message.
[1] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), pp. 126-7
[2] N. Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Ark, 1981), p. 6
[3] See Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (London: Fontana, 1997) for a fascinating discussion of the magical powers ascribed by many cultures to language, and much more besides.
[4] My argument in certain respects resembles that of David Bentley Hart in his monumental The Beauty of the Infinite. Hart mounts a defence of the ‘beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism appeals’ (p.1) against the same charge from contemporary philosophy that concerns us here: that this Christian rhetoric of peace is in fact inescapably violent. As Hart writes: ‘Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a great, as an episode in the endless epic of power’ (p. 3). This is our question too: though where Hart more generally speaks of the Christian evangel and the life of the church (which looms large for him as an Eastern Orthodox theologian) our focus is the Scriptures as the source and guarantor of Christian rhetoric. If the scriptures are merely an iron fist, even if placed in a velvet glove, then the Nietzchean/postmodern charge is sustained. See David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.; Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003)
The wizard & the prophet
‘Now, don’t forget that nice wrist movement we’ve been practicing!’ squeaked Professor Flitwick, perched on top of his pile of books as usual. ‘Swish and flick, remember, swish and flick. And saying the magic words properly is very important, too – never forget Wizard Baruffio, who said ‘s’ instead of ‘f’ and found himself on the floor with a buffalo on his chest.’
It was very difficult. Harry and Seamus swished and flicked, but the feather they were supposed to be sending skywards just lay on the desktop. Seamus got so impertinent that he prodded it with his wand and set fire to it – Harry had to put it out with his hat.
Ron, at the next table, wasn’t having much more luck.
‘Wingardium Leviosa!’ he shouted, waving his long arms like a windmill.
‘You’re saying it wrong,’ Harry heard Hermione snap. ‘It’s Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa, make the ‘gar’ nice and long.’
You do it, then, if you’re so clever,’ Ron snarled.
Hermione rolled up the sleeves of her gown, flicked her wand and said ‘Wingardium Leviosa!’
Their feather rose off the desk and hovered about four feet above their heads.[1]
I Wizard Words
It has since ancient times been a human dream that the mere utterance of words - at least some words – may accomplish powerful acts. The hunch that many ‘primitive’ cultures have had is that a word and its object are linked by a particular kind of energy, a magic, that is brought into being by the articulation of the very word.[2] It is the wizard or witch who masters the spell who controls the magic and so wields its power. Further, the ancients suspected that knowing the name of a god or spirit gave one power over it: and so the real name of Rome, for example, was concealed for fear of the curses of her enemies. Despite the sweetness of Hermione and Harry, this wielder of word-power is one to be feared, on account of the very real possibility of a non-negotiable whisper that may imprison or enchant another. This terror is deep in the consciousness of most human cultures.[3] So, it is at the same time a dream to be the speaker of such words and a nightmare to live in a world where others may speak them.
Since Nietzche – and especially among his postmodern children – the suspicion is that the Bible is an attempt to introduce ‘wizard words’ into human community: that it is the supreme exercise in exploitative manipulation by words. The Bible is suspected of pretending to a power of an illegitimate kind: of trading in a hypnotic rhetoric. Further, the Bible, because of its evident power in human culture, it is felt, is susceptible to being harnessed in the interests of human power. At heart, this is an ethical protest: it questions the moral right of the claim that the Scriptures address human lives with authority. What is needed is rather emancipation from the spell that such books have over human communities.
However, as I shall contend, the Bible evades this critique on account of the nature of its contents. Though it testifies to a God whose words called the universe into being, it also relates the history of that God’s costly gentleness with his people. The heartbeat of the Scriptures is the gospel of the sacrificial love of God for the world in Jesus Christ – it consists in a laying aside of power for the purpose of peaceful reconciliation rather than a naked assertion of it for the purpose of domination.[4] My first task will be to outline the power-critics case against the Bible; my response will be to inquire into the way in which the Bible seeks to persuade its readers of its message.
[1] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), pp. 126-7
[2] N. Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Ark, 1981), p. 6
[3] See Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (London: Fontana, 1997) for a fascinating discussion of the magical powers ascribed by many cultures to language, and much more besides.
[4] My argument in certain respects resembles that of David Bentley Hart in his monumental The Beauty of the Infinite. Hart mounts a defence of the ‘beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism appeals’ (p.1) against the same charge from contemporary philosophy that concerns us here: that this Christian rhetoric of peace is in fact inescapably violent. As Hart writes: ‘Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a great, as an episode in the endless epic of power’ (p. 3). This is our question too: though where Hart more generally speaks of the Christian evangel and the life of the church (which looms large for him as an Eastern Orthodox theologian) our focus is the Scriptures as the source and guarantor of Christian rhetoric. If the scriptures are merely an iron fist, even if placed in a velvet glove, then the Nietzchean/postmodern charge is sustained. See David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.; Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003)
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The living out scripture meme
Jason and Byron tagged me with this meme begun originally by Andy Goodliff. I haven't done them before because I get confused doing all those links... but this is a good one.
The brief is to post "that verse or story of scripture which is important to you, which you find yourself re-visiting time after time".
For me: Colossians 1:15-20:
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
I guess I just didn't realise how big the work of God in Christ was until I 'discovered' this passage. It's the scope that gets me: not only is Christ the supreme means and end of the whole creation in all its material and immaterial aspects, he is also its final destiny. Even death is not insurmountable, though of course the passage points to Christ's death as the point of peace and reconciliation between all things and himself. The atonement is a universal reconciliation of all things in Christ, to Christ.
The song that comes to mind? Radiohead's Everything in its Right Place. I am sure they didn't mean it to be a Psalm, but it is.
[PS: I notice that in Pierced for our Transgressions the authors make nary a mention of this key passage. Shame.]
The brief is to post "that verse or story of scripture which is important to you, which you find yourself re-visiting time after time".
For me: Colossians 1:15-20:
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
I guess I just didn't realise how big the work of God in Christ was until I 'discovered' this passage. It's the scope that gets me: not only is Christ the supreme means and end of the whole creation in all its material and immaterial aspects, he is also its final destiny. Even death is not insurmountable, though of course the passage points to Christ's death as the point of peace and reconciliation between all things and himself. The atonement is a universal reconciliation of all things in Christ, to Christ.
The song that comes to mind? Radiohead's Everything in its Right Place. I am sure they didn't mean it to be a Psalm, but it is.
[PS: I notice that in Pierced for our Transgressions the authors make nary a mention of this key passage. Shame.]
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Reviewing: Brock, Wells, Thompson
I have taken three books to review for Anvil (a UK-based evangelical journal). Just some brief notes on my first impressions.
The first of these is Mark D Thompson's A Clear and Present Word. This is a no bull polemical call to return to and recapture the Reformation doctrine of the clarity of scripture. I have to say I heard the lecture version of these and it looks as if they have really been given a full revision for publication. Mark has a real gift for summarising other points of view - surveying the terrain quickly AND thoroughly, so that an immense amount of ground is covered in no time at all. Mark tries to clear away the philosophical and theoretical tangle and ask what Scripture's own attestation to itself is. Of course, like many Reformation doctrines, this one suffers from bad press based on a great deal of misinformation and caricature, so necessarily the book does a job of clarifying clarity. In a nutshell, Thommo is convinced that God is very good at saying what he wants to say. (Exiled Preacher, I think you would enjoy this book!)
Secondly, I have been reading Aberdeen ethics lecture Brian Brock's new work Singing the Ethos of God - On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture. I haven't got far, but as my own supervisor says of it: 'Beyond Hermeneutics would have been an apt subtitle for this groundbreaking study'. Essentially, Brock enlists the help of Luther and Augustine to engage in a reading of the Psalms as texts to pray and sing. Too often, ethics has come to the Scripture with its own agendas and theories rather than starting with the ancient practice of praying and praising with the text. As Brock writes:
Praise takes us inside God's works. It reveals God's daily care in providing the food that sustains living creatures, and the time, space, and emodiment in which all creation exists. He makes human sociality possible by providing, reneing and reclaiming language. He sustains this social space by setting up political authorities and maintaining peace. At the heart of human political life is the church, a community that learns from Scripture how to praise, with all creation, the divine inexhaustibility. In the church, the twisted sociality that expresses the ethos of self-interest, fear, and tribalism is remade into a political order whose telos is the discovery of the divine ethos of diversity in mutuality [is this really the divine ethos? MJ]. It is a renewal sustained by the divine gift of Scripture, thourgh which God invites and facilitates human praise. In praise the communion of saints continually rediscovers that God uses our faltering collaboration to bring humanity in tune with himself. p. 363.
Thirdly, I have God's Companions by Sam Wells, co-editor with Hauerwas of the gratingly cheesy Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (every chapter opens with a tear-jearking anecdote about 'what happens in my church', in an attempt to ground the thing in the practices of church life). From my first impressions (and I hope to be corrected), this book shares the Companion's laudable emphasis on the local church, but also its 'we do it this way and it is so beautiful' anecdotalism and sentimentality. Hmm...
The first of these is Mark D Thompson's A Clear and Present Word. This is a no bull polemical call to return to and recapture the Reformation doctrine of the clarity of scripture. I have to say I heard the lecture version of these and it looks as if they have really been given a full revision for publication. Mark has a real gift for summarising other points of view - surveying the terrain quickly AND thoroughly, so that an immense amount of ground is covered in no time at all. Mark tries to clear away the philosophical and theoretical tangle and ask what Scripture's own attestation to itself is. Of course, like many Reformation doctrines, this one suffers from bad press based on a great deal of misinformation and caricature, so necessarily the book does a job of clarifying clarity. In a nutshell, Thommo is convinced that God is very good at saying what he wants to say. (Exiled Preacher, I think you would enjoy this book!)
Secondly, I have been reading Aberdeen ethics lecture Brian Brock's new work Singing the Ethos of God - On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture. I haven't got far, but as my own supervisor says of it: 'Beyond Hermeneutics would have been an apt subtitle for this groundbreaking study'. Essentially, Brock enlists the help of Luther and Augustine to engage in a reading of the Psalms as texts to pray and sing. Too often, ethics has come to the Scripture with its own agendas and theories rather than starting with the ancient practice of praying and praising with the text. As Brock writes:
Praise takes us inside God's works. It reveals God's daily care in providing the food that sustains living creatures, and the time, space, and emodiment in which all creation exists. He makes human sociality possible by providing, reneing and reclaiming language. He sustains this social space by setting up political authorities and maintaining peace. At the heart of human political life is the church, a community that learns from Scripture how to praise, with all creation, the divine inexhaustibility. In the church, the twisted sociality that expresses the ethos of self-interest, fear, and tribalism is remade into a political order whose telos is the discovery of the divine ethos of diversity in mutuality [is this really the divine ethos? MJ]. It is a renewal sustained by the divine gift of Scripture, thourgh which God invites and facilitates human praise. In praise the communion of saints continually rediscovers that God uses our faltering collaboration to bring humanity in tune with himself. p. 363.
Thirdly, I have God's Companions by Sam Wells, co-editor with Hauerwas of the gratingly cheesy Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (every chapter opens with a tear-jearking anecdote about 'what happens in my church', in an attempt to ground the thing in the practices of church life). From my first impressions (and I hope to be corrected), this book shares the Companion's laudable emphasis on the local church, but also its 'we do it this way and it is so beautiful' anecdotalism and sentimentality. Hmm...
Friday, May 25, 2007
Ricoeur on Narrative Theology
Harris Manchester College, Oxford.At the end of his article 'Biblical Time' Ricoeur, asserting that the strands of the OT combine to produce a very complex notion of 'time', critiques the proposal for a kind of narrative theology:
...the project of a merely narrative theology is a chimera. What it fundamentally fails to understand is first the primitive overlapping of narrative and law in the Torah, then the dialectic between the whole of tradition as prescriptive as well as narrative with prophecy and its eschatological indication. Next, a simple narrative theology misses the deepening of the transitory character of historical accomplishments through the immemorial time of wisdom, and, finally, and most important of all, the powerful recapitulation of all these figures of time in the 'today' of the hymn.'
See, the bible is not just a narrative: it's a musical. At one and the same time, you have a particular history, and a universal history of the world; you have action and commentary on that action; you have the past sung into the present, and the future promised. He's spot on, but I can't help feeling that Reformers knew this already. Certainly, my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy has been saying this for years. Still it is nice to have someone with Ricoeur's street cred saying the same thing.
Ricoeur on Biblical Time
Ricoeur points out that the dichotomy between so-called Greek time (as circular) and Hebraic time (as linear) is facile and won't hold. He then goes on to describe 'biblical time' in terms of the intersection of the different literary genres within the scriptures and their perceptions of time. So:
The instruction issuing from the successive legislations, unified under the emblem of Sinai and Moses, colors the narratives themselves. These narratives, under the pressure of the prescriptive, become narratives of the march of a people with God under the sign of obedience and disobedience.
He calls this the 'narrativisation of ethics and the ethicisation of narratives'. What has this to do with time, especially? Well:
...the law qualifies not just the event of its giving but all the narratives in which this giving is encased, in such a way that the founding events become events that do not pass away but remain.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Rowan Williams on Scripture
A few days ago Rowan Williams gave an intriguing lecture on Scripture in Canada. In the middle of the lecture he made an intriguing comment about Romans 1, the text at the centre of debates about homosexuality and the church:Paul in the first chapter of Romans famously uses same-sex relationships as an illustration of human depravity – along with other ‘unnatural’ behaviours such as scandal, disobedience to parents and lack of pity. It is, for the majority of modern readers the most important single text in Scripture on the subject of homosexuality, and has understandably been the focus of an enormous amount of exegetical attention.
What is Paul’s argument? And, once again, what is the movement that the text seeks to facilitate? The answer is in the opening of chapter 2: we have been listing examples of the barefaced perversity of those who cannot see the requirements of the natural order in front of their noses; well, it is precisely the same perversity that affects those who have received the revelation of God and persist in self-seeking and self-deceit. The change envisaged is from confidence in having received divine revelation to an awareness of universal sinfulness and need. Once again, there is a paradox in reading Romans 1 as a foundation for identifying in others a level of sin that is not found in the chosen community.
Now this gives little comfort to either party in the current culture wars in the Church. It is not helpful for a ‘liberal’ or revisionist case, since the whole point of Paul’s rhetorical gambit is that everyone in his imagined readership agrees in thinking the same-sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents. It is not very helpful to the conservative either, though, because Paul insists on shifting the focus away from the objects of moral disapprobation in chapter 1 to the reading /hearing subject who has been up to this point happily identifying with Paul’s castigation of someone else. The complex and interesting argument of chapter 1 about certain forms of sin beginning by the ‘exchange’ of true for false perception and natural for unnatural desire stands, but now has to be applied not to the pagan world alone but to the ‘insiders’ of the chosen community. Paul is making a primary point not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law-abiding.
The intriguing thing for me is that he is absolutely right - but that no-one taking the conservative position would ever deny that he was right. Of course Paul's rhetorical point in Rom 1 and 2 is meant to ambush the self-righteous. But as Williams himself appears to concede here, there is no question but that Paul and his readers would have agreed that same-sex sex was part of the distortion of the created order in the same way that idolatry and disobedience to parents is. The question is I suppose: what authority has that agreement between Paul and his readers? Can we really just sift it out as a mistake - and still claim any semblance of orthodoxy? Honestly now?
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Goldingay and the OT
I have been reading John Goldingay's Old Testament Theology: Israel's Gospel which is the first of three volumes in a planned OT Theology. To my mind, every Christian theologian of whatever stripe ought to at least have OT theology as a hobby - bearing in mind that OT Theologies as such have only been written in the last century or so. And 'OT theology' is a far more fruitful and interesting approach to the OT than reading commentaries on individual books. For one thing, it shows just what a complex - and rich - entity the Hebrew scriptures are.
Anyhow, Goldingay writes a very interesting appendix to his first volume, on the matter of history and criticism. As he puts it:
Modern historical study has presupposed that we are in a better position to determine where the facts lie than the authors of premodern narratives were, as well as having the motivation to do that. The trouble is that the resuts of a historical approach to the First Testament narratives are disappointing... First, in the 2000s we know much less than we knew in 1900 or 1950 about the origin of most of the narratives. p. 866
Speculation, as Goldingay shows, has repeatedly become confident assertion in one generation only to be exposed and overthrown in the next. And the real business - of asking 'what are these texts actually saying?' becomes further obscured. Gerhard von Rad's work is an interesting example: I find his interpretations and insights almost always fascinating and helpful and he writes with rare power. But you have to pass over or take with some grains of salt his source-critical and historical material which has not stood the test of time.
Anyhow, Goldingay writes a very interesting appendix to his first volume, on the matter of history and criticism. As he puts it:
Modern historical study has presupposed that we are in a better position to determine where the facts lie than the authors of premodern narratives were, as well as having the motivation to do that. The trouble is that the resuts of a historical approach to the First Testament narratives are disappointing... First, in the 2000s we know much less than we knew in 1900 or 1950 about the origin of most of the narratives. p. 866
Speculation, as Goldingay shows, has repeatedly become confident assertion in one generation only to be exposed and overthrown in the next. And the real business - of asking 'what are these texts actually saying?' becomes further obscured. Gerhard von Rad's work is an interesting example: I find his interpretations and insights almost always fascinating and helpful and he writes with rare power. But you have to pass over or take with some grains of salt his source-critical and historical material which has not stood the test of time.
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